World of Higher Education podcast, Season 2, Episode 21
Lumina Foundation history and goals for the nation with Courtney Brown, Excerpts from the podcast
March 7, 2024How was Lumina Foundation created?
Alex Usher: “Back in 1999, something kind of miraculous occurred in Indiana. A local student loan guarantee agency, known as the USA Group, was bought out by what was then known as the Student Loan Marketing Association, or Sallie Mae, now known as Navient, but because USA Group was a non-profit organization, the law said that the proceeds of the sale needed to be put towards some charitable endeavor. And thus a few months later was born the Lumina Foundation with its headquarters in Indianapolis, endowed at its start with over 1 billion U.S. in assets, all to be used for the purpose of expanding access and success in postsecondary education.”
Courtney Brown: “Lumina was created in 2000, and it was actually when two organizations merged, and a profit came out, so they had to create a private foundation. The two that merged were about higher education. So, Lumina knew when they were created that they wanted to focus on higher education.”
What inspired the 60% attainment goal?
CB: “Around 2008 Lumina was looking for new leadership and trying to think about what the next direction is. We brought in a new CEO, Jamie Merisotis and part of the board and Jamie’s negotiations was really thinking about where Lumina could go. What they did was they looked at where we were as a nation and understood that access while important isn’t sufficient. We had to think about how do we get more people, not just into the door of college, but through the door. The purpose of getting them through the door to a credential is to help our labor market. We did a lot of looking at research, some work that Tony Carnevale did at Georgetown Center on Education in the Workforce, and they were showing that by 2020 that we would need at least, 60% to 62% of people with credentials. While we are looking at what Tony’s work was showing that we were going to need a much better educated population, we also looked around the world. I think many people in the United States think “oh, the U.S. is the best higher ed system in the world and we do it so well,” but the reality when we started comparing the US to other countries where we were about 12th in the globe with regards to higher education attainment. We recognized if we not only wanted to fill the labor market needs in the US, but if we wanted to be globally competitive, we needed to up our game. We need to increase attainment. So around the end of 2008 and into 2009, Lumina set a goal for the nation. So, this is not Lumina’s goal. This is the U.S. national goal that by 2025, we wanted to increase the people living in the United States that had high-quality credentials or degrees to 60 percent by 2025. So yes, an incredibly ambitious goal that was set in 2009.”
A Stronger Nation data tool
See education levels nationally, by state, and ethnicity
On tracking the nation’s progress toward the goal
CB: “We’re nationwide where our home base is in Indianapolis, Indiana. One of the things we have done when we set the goal is we created something called Stronger Nation. It’s an online tool. It’s accessible. Anybody who’s listening can just Google “Stronger Nation Lumina Foundation” and you’ll see this tool that is our way of staying accountable to the goal and keeping the nation accountable to the goal. It shows the data, we don’t hide from it. We outline it for every state, every county, metro area. So, you can see where we are and how much further we need to go. It disaggregates by race, ethnicity, and age. It’s actually a pretty cool tool. I encourage everybody to go play on it, but I think in doing that, we set the stage and said “We’re a trusted partner. We’re here to provide the information. We’re going to be accountable to ourselves and we want you all to be accountable also.” I think that kind of set a level playing field that we can be trusted with this information.”
Read the full transcript at the World of Higher Education podcast »